Sam Altman

Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT and Sora. Sam was president of the early-stage startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. In 2015, Sam co-founded OpenAI with the mission to build general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits all humanity.

Jo Ann Barefoot

My life’s work has been about convergence. As a former senior bank regulator and Capitol Hill staffer, I helped design and implement policy frameworks in the traditional financial system. Later, I leaned into the idea that less traditional solutions — with technology at their core — could make huge improvements in those legacy models. Today, I focus on the places where the disparate currents in our markets and regulatory systems can flow together to form something new and better than what came before it.

At AIR, we are helping to make the financial system fairer and more resilient by spurring the development of new solutions for financial consumers that employ the advantages and combat the risks of digital innovation. David Ehrich and I launched the Alliance in 2019 believing that such solutions can result from bringing together a community of leaders from disparate corners of the financial and technology ecosystems. Our mission is to connect government officials, digital innovators, financial providers, academics, nonprofits and other stakeholders, assembling a diverse network committed to the common goal of a technologically advanced regulatory system.

I have always been interested in the confluence of technology, markets, culture, social movements, science, art, education, global poverty reduction and, crucially, regulation in fostering the transformative ideas that make our world better. Here are some of the connections that I have strung together in my life:

Michael Barr

Michael S. Barr took office as the Vice Chair for Supervision of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on July 19, 2022 for a four-year term. He also serves as a member of the Board of Governors for an unexpired term ending January 31, 2032.

Prior to his appointment to the Board, Mr. Barr was the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Frank Murphy Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, the Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Proffitt Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and the founder and faculty director of the University of Michigan’s Center on Finance, Law & Policy. At the University of Michigan Law School, Mr. Barr taught financial regulation and international finance and co-founded the International Transactions Clinic and the Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project.

Mr. Barr served as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, 2009-2010. Under President William J. Clinton, he served as the Treasury Secretary’s special assistant, as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury, as special adviser to the President, and as a special adviser and counselor on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State.

Additionally, Mr. Barr served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter during October Term 1993, and previously to the Honorable Pierre N. Leval, then of the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Barr received a BA in history from Yale University, an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University, and a JD from Yale Law School.

Mark Brucker

Mark Brucker is the Chief Risk Officer for Consumer & Community Banking (CCB) at JPMorgan Chase. He serves as the Firmwide Risk Executive for Quantitative Risk Appetite and Risk Identification, and is a member of the Firmwide Risk Committee, Risk Operating Committee and CCB Leadership Team. In the role of CRO he serves as the lead on consumer risk issues with internal and external constituencies, including our regulators.

Mark has over 30 years of risk and operations experience across multiple consumer and business products, most recently as the Chief Risk Officer for Card Services.

Before joining Chase, Mark served in various consumer lending credit, operational and risk roles at Bank of America. He held leadership positions in the small business, credit card, auto and mortgage businesses.

Mark is a board member of ProSight Financial Association, Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic and Executive Advisor for Wake Forest University Center for the Study of Capitalism. Mark has three adult children and he and his wife live in Kennett Square, PA.

Mark holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Wake Forest University.

Chris Brummer

Chris Brummer is the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Financial Technology at Georgetown University Law Center and the Faculty Director of Georgetown’s Institute of International Economic Law. As a professor, advisor, board member and advocate, Chris has lent his expertise to policymakers, founders, startups, and nonprofits around the world grappling with some of the most challenging puzzles facing innovation, regulation, and inclusion. His work has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, Marketwatch, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Yahoo Money, Roll Call, Cointelegraph, and Coin Desk, among others.

Chris’s public service and volunteer work extend across government. In addition to serving as a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Subcommittee on Virtual Currencies and the Consultative Working Group for the European Securities and Markets Authority’s Financial Innovation Standing Committee, Chris has served as a member of the National Adjudicatory Council of FINRA. Most recently, he served as a member of the Biden-Harris Transition team, assisting in leading work streams relating to financial technology, racial equity and systemic risk for the Treasury ART. He is currently the Co-Chair of CNAS Task Force on FinTech, Crypto, and National Security.

A frequent speaker and lecturer, Chris was asked to deliver the keynote speech for the SEC’s Black History celebration in 2021, FinCEN’s Black History celebration in 2022, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s celebration in 2023.

Chris graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis, holds a J.D. with honors from Columbia Law School and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is the author or editor of several books, including Cryptoassets: Legal, Regulatory and Monetary Perspectives and Fintech Law in a Nutshell.

Chris is the host of CQ Roll Call’s Fintech Beat podcast, and founder of Washington DC’s Fintech Week, an annual free event for the public.

John Hope Bryant

John Hope Bryant is an American entrepreneur, thought leader, philanthropic executive, and a leading expert in financial and economic inclusion. Bryant, named in 2024 by TIME Magazine to their inaugural list of The Closers, 18 global leaders working to close the racial wealth gap, is a CNBC Contributor, host of the iHeart Radio podcast, “Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant,” a member of the CNBC Global Financial Wellness Council and the CNBC CEO Council, and a best-selling author of six books, including Financial Literacy For All, released April 2024. He is one of the only Black bestselling authors on economics and business leadership in the world today.

Referred to as the “conscience of capitalism” by numerous Fortune 500 CEOs, Bryant is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Operation HOPE, Inc. the nation’s largest on-the-ground nonprofit provider of financial literacy. Bryant is also responsible for financial literacy becoming the official policy of the U.S. federal government (President George W. Bush and Obama), and is the only American citizen to ever inspire the renaming of a building on the White House campus; from the US Treasury Annex Building, to the Freedman’s Bank Building, in honor of Lincoln’s unfinished work to teach freed slaves about money, in 1865. Bryant also inspired the Treasury Department to host a Freedman’s Bank Forum, which has continued annually under successive administrations.

Operation HOPE, with hundreds of offices across America, is working to level the opportunity playing field for underserved America, connecting communities to the private sector through inclusive capitalism, at scale. Bryant’s personal mission is to unleash untapped human potential at scale, resulting in increased national GDP (economic growth).

Bryant the entrepreneur is also chairman and chief executive officer of John Hope Bryant Holdings, Bryant Group Ventures, Bryant Group Advisors, and executive chairman of The Promise Homes Company (Promise Homes), the largest for-profit minority-controlled owner of institutional-quality, single-family residential rental homes in the U.S. In December 2021, Bryant recapitalized and sold Promise Homes into a new Promise Homes Co. joint venture, successfully closing a $200M credit facility to grow the new housing joint venture. According to Black Enterprise, it was one of the largest capital raises by a Black-owned company in more than a decade.

Organizations founded by Bryant have provided more than $4.2 billion in capital for the underserved over the past three decades. The 1 Million Black Businesses Initiative (1MBB), conceived by Bryant and Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, was launched in October 2020, and has since started, served, or scaled nearly 400,000 Black-owned businesses, representing 12% of all Black businesses in America. On May 2, 2023, 1MBB was recognized by Fast Company with the 2023 ‘World Changing Ideas’ Award. Bryant also co-founded the Financial Literacy for All Initiative with Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, a movement of Fortune 500 executives united in leveraging their brands to embed financial literacy into U.S. culture.

Bryant’s financial empowerment work has been recognized by five U.S. presidents. He has served as an advisor to three sitting U.S. presidents representing both parties.

In 2021, Bryant was called upon by U.S. Treasury officials to help design aspects of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) tied to small enterprises, which helped millions of small businesses and entrepreneurs survive during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2008, Bryant inspired President George W. Bush to make financial literacy the official policy of the U.S. federal government. Following 9/11, Bryant also worked with the Bush Administration to create a new federal policy framework for emergency financial disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, resulting in a first-ever partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/FEMA and Operation HOPE.

Bryant has received hundreds of awards and citations for his work, including Oprah Winfrey’s “Use Your Life” Award, and the “John Sherman Award for Excellence in Financial Education” from the U.S. Department of Treasury. He was part of TIME Magazine’s inaugural class of “50 Leaders for the Future” in 1994, alongside Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Maya Lin, and Wynton Marsalis, and American Banker named him

“Innovator of the Year” in 2016.

Jay Budzik

Jay Budzik is Senior Vice President, Director AI/ML Model Development and Operations at Fifth Third Bank.  Prior to Fifth Third, Jay was CTO at Zest AI, where he led the data science, engineering and product management teams that pioneered the use of AI in consumer loan underwriting, serving clients such as Freddie Mac, Citibank, Truist, Discover, and over 100 regional banks and credit unions.  Prior to Zest AI, Jay founded and successfully exited several AI-enabled enterprise SaaS companies.  Jay holds over 40 patents related to applied AI, earned a Ph. D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and a B. S. in Computer Science with honors from The University of Chicago.

Mike Calhoun

Mike Calhoun is president of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), the policy affiliate of Self-Help, the nation’s largest community development lender. He considers himself “fortunate to work with an extraordinarily talented staff and a dedicated coalition of organizations fighting to provide economic opportunity and advancement for low- and moderate-income families and families of color.”

For more than 30 years, Mike has been on the front lines of working for economic justice. At CRL, he provides management and policy leadership. Based in DC, he often testifies in Congress and appears frequently in national media as an expert on financial issues. Prior to joining CRL in 2002, Mike led several lending divisions at Self-Help, providing responsible consumer loans, mortgages and small business loans, and heading an innovative program to provide national capital for affordable home loans. He has represented families to secure civil rights and consumer protections, including working for ten years as a legal aid attorney. He is a former member and chair of the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council.

Mike received his BA degree in economics from Duke University, and his JD degree from the University of North Carolina. When he is not advocating on behalf of fair lending and civil rights, Mikes loves time with family, gardening, sailing and playing basketball.

Oren Cass

Oren Cass is the founder and chief economist at American Compass and author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (2018). He is a contributing editor at the Financial Times and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

Jimmy Chen

Jimmy Chen is the Founder and CEO of Propel, creators of the Providers app, which is used by over 5 million Americans to manage their SNAP benefits and banking. Propel was founded through a fellowship at the Robin Hood Foundation, and has raised over $80m in venture capital funding from investors including the Financial Health Network, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Kevin Durant, and Serena Williams.

In addition to his work at Propel, Jimmy is Vice Chair of Technology at the eGovernment Payments Council (an industry task force around the future of government payments), he was an advisor to President Biden’s Tech Transition Committee, and he has testified in front of Congress on the topic of modernizing America’s safety net. Prior to Propel, Jimmy was a Product Manager at LinkedIn and Facebook and studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.

Outside of work, Jimmy is a competitive ultimate frisbee player, a diehard fan of Kansas City sports, and an aspiring word game geek. Jimmy is based in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and their dog.

Rohit Chopra

Rohit Chopra is Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB is a unit of the Federal Reserve System charged with protecting families and honest businesses from illegal practices by financial institutions, and ensuring that markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive. As Director, Chopra is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

In 2018, Chopra was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, where he served until assuming office as CFPB Director. During his tenure at the FTC, he successfully worked to strengthen sanctions against repeat offenders, to reverse the agency’s reliance on no-money, no-fault settlements in fraud cases, and to halt abuses of small businesses. He also led efforts to revitalize dormant authorities, such as those to protect the Made in USA label and to promote competition.

The Director previously served at the CFPB from 2010 to 2015. In 2011, the Secretary of the Treasury designated him as the agency’s student loan ombudsman, where he led the Bureau’s efforts on student lending issues. Prior to his government service, Chopra worked at McKinsey & Company, the global management consultancy, where he worked in the financial services, health care, and consumer technology sectors.

Chopra holds a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Amy Friend

Amy Friend is a member of the Board of Directors at FinRegLab and Varo Money Inc.

Amy was previously the Senior Deputy Comptroller and Chief Counsel at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury that regulates and supervises the federal banking system. In that capacity, Amy served on the agency’s executive committee and oversaw all of the agency’s legal activities and licensing functions. Amy led the team that developed the agency’s strategic initiative on responsible innovation resulting in the establishment of the Office of Innovation and the special purpose national bank charter for fintech companies.

Before taking on this role, Amy was a Managing Director at the Promontory Financial Group where she advised financial services companies about regulatory compliance. Previously Amy held a number of positions in the U.S. Congress, including Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs where she led the Committee’s work in crafting the Dodd-Frank Act. Amy has also served as an assistant chief counsel to the OCC, focusing on consumer privacy, data security, and credit reporting, and as an associate in the law firms of Jenner and Block, and Brownstein, Zeidman, and Schomer.

Laurent Domb

Laurent is the Chief Technologist for Worldwide Federal Financial Services at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and heads up the Worldwide resilience/chaos engineering focus group. In this role, he is responsible for the vision, thought leadership across technology domains, and development and execution of strategies across Worldwide Federal Financial Services that help AWS customers with their cloud transformation and adoption of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, serverless architectures, and DevSecOps/CI/CD practices. He enables customers independent of industry to build highly resilient applications on AWS. Laurent has deep experience in public, private financial services, the payments industry, and the financial regulatory landscape.

Patrice Ficklin

Patrice Alexander Ficklin is Fannie Mae’s Chief Fair Lending Officer. Her Fair Lending Oversight team partners across the company to promote Fannie Mae’s compliance with fair lending laws and regulations. Before joining Fannie Mae in July 2024, Ms. Ficklin served as the founding Fair Lending Director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, building and leading the agency’s Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity and its historic efforts to ensure fair, equitable and nondiscriminatory access to credit for consumers, entrepreneurs, and communities. She serves as a Fellow in the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and is a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law School.

Grovetta Gardineer

Grovetta N. Gardineer is the Senior Deputy Comptroller for Bank Supervision Policy at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

In this role, Ms. Gardineer directs the formulation of policies and procedures for the supervision and examination of national banks and federal savings associations, chairs the agency’s Committee on Bank Supervision, and serves on the OCC’s Executive Committee. She oversees the units for policy related to credit risk, market risk, operational risk, and compliance risk, as well as the units responsible for international banking and capital policy, accounting policy, community affairs and financial technology. She assumed this role in March 2019.

Previously, Ms. Gardineer served as the Senior Deputy Comptroller for Compliance and Community Affairs since March 2016. In that role, she oversaw agency compliance exams on national banks and federal savings associations and supervised the agency’s Community Affairs and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) programs. She also had responsibilities for policy and examination procedures relating to consumer issues and anti-money laundering and for representing the agency on interagency groups and activities related to compliance, CRA, fair lending, and the Bank Secrecy Act.

Ms. Gardineer was the Chair of the NeighborWorks® America Board of Directors from June 20, 2016, to June 27, 2019, and is currently a board member. Ms. Gardineer previously served as Deputy Comptroller for Compliance Risk at the OCC and oversaw development of policy and examination procedures relating to consumer issues and anti-money laundering. She served as a key advisor to the Committee on Bank Supervision and to the Comptroller on compliance and CRA matters. Ms. Gardineer joined the OCC in 2010.

Before joining the agency, she worked for the Office of Thrift Supervision, where she served as the Managing Director for Corporate and International Activities. Before that, she was the Managing Director for Supervision Policy, where she was responsible for several programs, including capital policy, credit risk, trust operations, accounting policy, and information technology risk assessment. Before joining the Office of Thrift Supervision, Ms. Gardineer spent several years as an attorney with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation handling enforcement actions and preparing policies and regulations affecting the financial services industry.

Ms. Gardineer earned her juris doctor degree, cum laude, from North Carolina Central University and her bachelor’s degree from Wake Forest University.

Don Graves

Don Graves is the 19th Deputy Secretary of Commerce. 

Graves serves as the Economic Growth Coordinator for Puerto Rico, overseeing a whole-of-government effort to support the economic recovery and long-term growth of the archipelago, and is also a Commissioner of the Helsinki Commission, formally known as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Graves brings decades of experience in the private sector, government, and nonprofits to the Department of Commerce, including as an entrepreneur. Most recently, he served as Counselor to President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign. Prior to that, Graves served as Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Responsibility and Community Relations at KeyBank. 

During the Obama-Biden Administration, Graves served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Domestic and Economic Policy Director for then-Vice President Biden. He was previously appointed by President Obama as Executive Director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and led the federal government’s efforts in the economic recovery of the city of Detroit. Graves also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Small Business, Community Development, and Housing Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he oversaw the CDFI Fund, the $4 billion Small Business Lending Fund, and the $1.5 billion State Small Business Credit Initiative. He was also the U.S. Federal Representative to the G7 Task Force on Social Impact Investment.  

He has also served on the Board of Directors of the MetroHealth Foundation, the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion, the Board of Trustees of the Community Reinvestment Fund, the Policy Advisory Board of the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, the Board of Visitors of the Cuyahoga Community College, the Advisory Board of the Commission on Economic Inclusion, and as Co-Chair of Cleveland Rising.

Graves has a rich family history connected to the Commerce Department. His four-times great-grandparents built a successful horse and buggy taxi business in Washington that once stood at the site of the Department’s headquarters. Their son went on to own a premier hotel just blocks away and become one of our nation’s first Black patent-holders through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  

Graves holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History from Williams College and a Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he received the Dean’s Award.

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne A. Harris was nominated to lead the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) by Governor Kathy Hochul in August, 2021 and confirmed by the New York State Senate on January 25, 2022.

Superintendent Harris began her career as an Associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City representing a number of U.S. and non-U.S. based corporations in various forms of litigation and regulatory matters, before accepting a position at the United States Department of the Treasury under President Obama.

While at the Treasury Department, Superintendent Harris served as a Senior Advisor to both Acting Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Mary Miller, and Deputy Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin. Her work ranged from financial reform efforts to identifying solutions to the student loan crisis, analyzing the nexus between foreign investment and national security, and working to promote financial inclusion and health in communities throughout the country.

Following her time at the Treasury Department, Superintendent Harris joined The White House, where she was appointed as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, as part of the National Economic Council. In this role, she managed the financial services portfolio, which included developing and executing strategies for financial reform and the implementation of Dodd-Frank, consumer protections for the American public, cybersecurity and housing finance reform priorities.

After leaving the White House in January 2017, Superintendent Harris went on to serve as General Counsel and Chief Business Officer at States Title, Inc. (now DOMA), which provides a more simple and affordable closing experience for homebuyers.

Prior to being nominated, she also served as a Professor and as Faculty Co-Director at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy’s Center on Finance, Law and Policy at the University of Michigan, as well as a Senior Advisor at the Brunswick Group in Washington, D.C.

Michael Hsu

Mr. Hsu became Acting Comptroller of the Currency on May 10, 2021.

As Acting Comptroller of the Currency, Mr. Hsu is the administrator of the federal banking system and chief executive officer of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC ensures that the federal banking system operates in a safe and sound manner, provides fair access to financial services, treats customers fairly, and complies with applicable laws and regulations. It supervises nearly 1,100 national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks that serve consumers, businesses, and communities across the United States. These banks range from community banks to the nation’s largest most internationally active banks.

The Comptroller also serves as a Director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a member of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC). Mr. Hsu has served as Chair of the FFIEC since April 1, 2023.

Prior to joining the OCC, Mr. Hsu served as an Associate Director in the Division of Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. In that role, he chaired the Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee Operating Committee, which has responsibility for supervising the global systemically important banking companies operating in the United States.

His career also has included serving as a Financial Sector Expert at the International Monetary Fund, Financial Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Financial Economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Hsu holds a bachelor of arts from Brown University, a master of science in finance from George Washington University, and juris doctor degree from New York University School of Law.

Melissa Koide

Prior to establishing FinRegLab, Melissa served as the U.S. Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Consumer Policy. In that role, Melissa helped to build the first government offered preretirement savings product, the myRA. She also established the $5 million Innovation Fund to support research and strategies to improve consumers’ financial health and their access to safe and affordable financial products and services. Melissa has testified before the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees, and she has spoken extensively to policy, industry, and consumer advocacy audiences. She is also a member of the New York State Department of Financial Services’ Financial Innovation Advisory Board.

Max Levchin

Max Levchin is the Founder & CEO of Affirm, a financial services technology company. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company, and co-founder and general partner at SciFi VC, a private venture capital firm. All three companies were created and launched from his San Francisco based innovation lab, HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun). Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal where he served as the CTO until its acquisition by eBay in 2002.

In 2004, he founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service, which he sold to Google in August 2010. Also in 2004, he helped start Yelp, where he was the company’s first investor and Chairman of the Board until 2015. He has served on several boards such as Yahoo!, Yelp, and Evernote. Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist, and active investor in more than 100 startups.   

Jelena McWilliams

PARTNER, CORPORATE

Jelena McWilliams is Managing Partner of Cravath’s Washington, D.C. office and Head of the Financial Institutions Group (FIG) Practice. She is a former Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Ms. McWilliams focuses her practice on advising public and private companies, financial institutions, fintechs, and early-stage and venture companies on regulatory and corporate matters, as well as on mergers and acquisitions, IPO and other capital markets transactions. Prior to her tenure as FDIC Chairman, Ms. McWilliams served as Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, and Corporate Secretary for Fifth Third Bank. Before that, Ms. McWilliams served as Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

John Morgan

John Morgan is a Sr. Director at Capital One and manages a team of 40+ data scientists and business analysts. He has worked as a data scientist in the financial services industry for ten years with a focus on predictive modeling for credit and insurance underwriting, as well as competitive intelligence, capital adequacy, and development of proprietary solvers. Prior to becoming a data scientist, John worked in computational astrophysics at the ASC Flash center at the University of Chicago, where he’s ABD (a euphemism for “post-master’s degree graduate school dropout”) in Astronomy and Astrophysics. He holds a B.Sc. in physics from UIUC.

Hans Morris

Hans Morris is managing partner of Nyca Partners, a fintech VC in New York and San Francisco founded in 2014. Nyca has over 80 active investments, and is currently investing from its fourth fund. He is the chairman of the board of Lending Club, and a board member of several private companies, including SigFig, Thought Machine, Fidel, SentiLink, Gr4vy, and Necto.

From 2010 to 2014 he was a managing director at General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm. From 2007 until 2010 he served as president of Visa Inc., and from 1980 until 2007, he worked at Citigroup in several operating and management roles, including CFO and head of finance, technology, and operations for Citi’s institutional businesses, COO of the investment bank, and head of the financial services group at Salomon Smith Barney.

He is a trustee of the Public Theater in New York and a former chairman of the boards of MASS MoCA and the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth. He graduated from Dartmouth College.

Prem Natarajan

Prem Natarajan serves as chief scientist and head of enterprise AI for Capital One, a position he assumed in 2023. In this role, he will manage technology strategy, architecture, and development for the firm’s enterprise data, machine learning, and analytics initiatives. 

Prior to joining Capital One, Natarajan was at Amazon, where he served as vice president, Alexa AI. Earlier in his career he worked at the University of Southern California in a variety of roles, including as the founding executive director of the USC Computing Forum, senior vice dean of engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering, and executive director of the Information Sciences Institute. 

Natarajan received his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Tufts University and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from COEP Technological University.

Andrew Olmem

Clients rely on Andrew Olmem for advice and counsel on complex financial services regulatory and legislative matters, including matters involving federal financial regulatory agencies, evaluating prospective legislation and regulations, advising on new legislative and regulatory requirements, and representing clients in congressional and regulatory investigations and other reputational risk matters.

Andrew previously served as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council (NEC), where he oversaw the development and coordination of the administration’s domestic economic policies, including for financial services, technology, telecom, energy, and infrastructure. At the White House, he played a key role in the passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, landmark legislation to address the economic downturn due to the coronavirus, and oversaw the administration’s regulatory reform initiatives. Andrew’s work coordinating economic policy has been publicly praised by the leadership of US financial regulators.

Before joining the White House, Andrew served as the Republican Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director for the US Senate Banking Committee. During his more than seven years at the Banking Committee, Andrew helped craft a wide range of financial services legislation, conducted congressional investigations, and participated in the consideration of legislation in response to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, including the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (TARP) and the Housing and Economic Recovery Act. He was a lead staff negotiator for the Dodd-Frank Act. Before attending law school, Andrew served as an assistant economist for monetary policy at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. A frequent commentator on economic policy and financial regulation, he has appeared on CNBC, Fox Business News, Bloomberg, and C-Span, and has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Politico. Andrew has also testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee.

Washingtonian Magazine listed Andrew as one of the 500 Most Influential People in Washington, while The American Lawyer named him one of their “Trailblazers,” recognizing individuals who are agents of change in the legal industry.

Koren Picariello

Koren Picariello is an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley and Head of Generative AI Strategy and Execution for Morgan Stanley.

Koren previously served as the Global Head of Risk and Business Control for Wealth Management Analytics, Data, and Innovation and has held a number of positions at the firm since joining in 2007.

Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, she worked in the Fixed Income, Banking, and Equity Strategies Division at Goldman Sachs and was Chief Administrative Officer at PTR Capital Management at the start of her career. Koren graduated from Rutgers University and earned bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Communication and Media Studies.

Rohan Ramanath

Rohan is an entrepreneur and technologist specializing in developing intelligent systems that leverage the power of data. He is passionate about category-defining products grounded in real-world problems. His start-up, Hyperplane, built the data-intelligence layer for banks was recently acquired by Nubank. This enables financial institutions to leverage their data through purpose-built foundation models that learn consumer preferences. Before that, he was the AI lead for LinkedIn’s fastest-growing line of business – ads. His work contributed step-function improvements to personalization in internet marketplaces and brought in $xxx million in realized revenue. Rohan studied Computer Science as an undergrad and received a Master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. He has published multiple papers at top-tier conferences and holds several patents in AI and ML.

Alex Rampell

Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $1 billion Apps practice. He serves on the boards of Branch, Brightside, Capitolis, Descript, Divvy Homes, Earnin, Flock Homes, FlyHomes, Loft, Point, Propel, Sentilink, Super Evil Megacorp, and VGS, and Wise (WISE:LSE). Alex additionally led the firm’s investments in OpenDoor ($OPEN), Plaid, Quantopian (acquired by Robinhood), and Rival (acquired by LiveNation).

Prior to joining the firm, Alex co-founded multiple companies including Affirm ($AFRM), which he co-founded with Max Levchin, FraudEliminator (acquired by McAfee in 2006), Point, TrialPay (acquired by Visa in 2015), TXN (acquired by Envestnet in 2019), and Yub (acquired by Coupons.com in 2013).

He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard University.

Lisa Rice

As President and CEO, Lisa Rice leads the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA)’s efforts to advance fair housing principles, preserve and broaden fair housing protections, and expand equal housing opportunities for millions of Americans. NFHA is the trade association for over 170 fair housing and justice-centered organizations and individuals throughout the U.S. and its territories, and is the nation’s only national civil rights agency solely dedicated to eliminating all forms of housing discrimination.

Ms. Rice is a published author contributing to several books and journals addressing a range of fair housing issues including — The Fight for Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences, and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act; Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World; Discriminatory Effects of Credit Scoring on Communities of Color; and From Foreclosure to Fair Lending: Advocacy, Organizing, Occupancy, and the Pursuit of Equitable Credit.

She played a major role in crafting sections of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and in establishing the Office of Fair Lending within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She also helped lead the investigation and resolution of precedent-setting fair housing cases which have resulted in providing remedies for millions of people as well as the elimination of systemic discriminatory practices involving lending, insurance, rental and zoning matters. She has received numerous honors and awards including the National Housing Conference’s Housing Visionary Award and was named as one of Time’s 2024 Closers. Ms. Rice also serves on various Boards and Advisory Councils.

Senator Mike Rounds

On January 6th, 2015, Senator Marion Michael “Mike” Rounds was sworn into the United States Senate. Senator Rounds serves on five committees: Senate Armed Services; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Indian Affairs; Veterans’ Affairs; and the Select Committee on Intelligence. 

Rounds previously served as the 31st governor of South Dakota from 2003 – 2011. From 1991 to 2000, he was elected five times to the South Dakota State Senate.

In 1995, his colleagues selected him to serve as Senate Majority Leader, a position that he held for six years. During his time in state government, Rounds was committed to growing the economy, keeping taxes low and strengthening South Dakota families.

 A lifelong South Dakotan, Senator Rounds was born in Huron, the eldest of 11 children. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from South Dakota State University. In the private sector, Rounds built a successful insurance and real estate business with offices throughout the state. He resides in Fort Pierre and is the proud parent of four grown children and 11 grandchildren.

Deborah Rutter

Ms. Rutter began as President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on September 1, 2014, and serves as curator of the Kennedy presidential memorial, and artistic and administrative director to the world’s busiest performing arts center.

Established as a “living memorial” by act of Congress in 1964, the Kennedy Center honors the 35th president, advancing his vision of excellence and diversity in the arts. In an ever expanding celebration of this legacy, the Center presents theater, contemporary dance, ballet, vocal music, chamber music, Hip Hop, comedy, international arts, and jazz, alongside dynamic seasons with the Kennedy Center’s world-class affiliates: the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera. As the work of a living memorial is never finished, Rutter is advancing the Center’s commitment to 21st century programming.

In her first year at the Kennedy Center, Rutter broke ground on a transformative arts facility, the REACH, which provides flexible indoor and outdoor performance space to nurture new art, community, innovation, arts education, and informal encounters between the artist and the public. Designed by renowned architect Steven Holl, the REACH graces the southern end of the campus and connects the Kennedy Center to the popular pedestrian and bicycle trail along the Potomac River.

Today, Ms. Rutter is reshaping Kennedy Center offerings to include more artist-led programming while challenging people across the industry to reimagine creative expression through the lens of cross-disciplinary collaborations. In 2018, she launched the cutting-edge festival of contemporary culture, DIRECT CURRENT, an annual series spotlighting new and interdisciplinary art. An adept team builder, Rutter is drawing some of the world’s most visionary, and most iconic artists to the Kennedy Center creative team, including cellist YoYo Ma, soprano Renée Fleming, singer-songwriter Ben Folds, and DJ and composer Mason Bates; as well as the Center’s first Artistic Director of Hip Hop Culture, Q-Tip. Rutter scored a “coup for the NSO,” according to The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette, by landing the prominent Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda as the National Symphony’s seventh Music Director.

Working at the vanguard of community engagement, Ms. Rutter manages one of the nation’s most extensive arts education networks, reaching millions of people of all ages across all 50 states with live performances, as well as providing multidisciplinary arts training and support to schools, students, children at risk, teachers, artists, and civic leaders. Rutter also administers VSA, an international organization providing arts enrichment programs to people with disabilities. In 2018, she forged a partnership with The Second City to co-produce new shows for the Kennedy Center and national stage, and to develop a comedy-centered education program for young people and adults.

Committed to art as “an agent for positive change” at the community level, Rutter established the Citizen Artist Fellowship at the Kennedy Center to provide training and support to emerging artists who have distinguished themselves in community activism. A lifelong champion of orchestral music, Rutter forged a partnership with Washington Performing Arts to stage the SHIFT Festival of American Orchestras, a multiyear showcase of ensembles from diverse communities working at the forefront of community engagement.

In the area of arts advocacy, Rutter worked with Artistic Advisor at Large Renée Fleming, to create a partnership with the National Institutes of Health to study treatments and health benefits associated with writing, performing, and listening to music. As a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Rutter serves as co-chair of the multiyear Commission on the Arts.

From August 2003 through June 2014, Ms. Rutter was President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, leading the internationally renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), the Institute for Learning, Access and Training (now the Negaunee Music Institute), the Civic Orchestra of Chicago for young professional musicians, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, and the eclectic concert series Symphony Center Presents. During her time with the CSO, she restored the orchestra to financial health, ushering in an era of record-breaking fundraising and ticket sales while purposefully engaging Chicago’s diverse communities to refashion the orchestra as a broad-reaching civic and cultural institution. In 2010, Rutter engaged Yo-Yo Ma as a creative consultant to foster community engagement and establish Citizen Musician, an artist-led community service program.

Prior to joining the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Rutter was Executive Director of the Seattle Symphony from 1992 until 2003 where she eliminated the orchestra’s deficit, tripled its annual budget, and grew the orchestra’s endowment by six-fold. During her tenure in Seattle, she oversaw the construction of Benaroya Hall, with two concert venues and the Soundbridge educational facility. Under her leadership, programming grew exponentially, including citywide musical festivals, and a wide range of community engagement activities. From 1986 to 1992, she served as executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and prior to that was the orchestra manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Deborah Rutter is a graduate of Stanford University and holds an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California. She was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in the Los Angeles area. She studied piano and violin from an early age, and played in orchestras throughout her student days.

Meredith Shields

Meredith comes to Citi from the Sorenson Impact Foundation, where she oversaw the Foundation’s early-stage investments in companies that develop solutions for underserved communities around the world focusing on key social impact sectors including education, healthcare, workforce development, and financial inclusion She has extensive experience in investment banking and strategy consulting, including with the Beyond Capital Fund in Zurich, Switzerland, Madison Capital, and Wells Fargo Investment Banking & Capital Markets.

She has also served on the President’s Council on Impact Investing for The U.S. Impact Investing Alliance and was an adviser to the Global Impact Investing Network’s R3 Coalition. Most recently, she worked with the World Economic Forum’s COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs and sat on the advisory board for Village Capital’s Building an Equitable Future Initiative.  She’s a graduate of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and has an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Meredith lives in Washington, DC with her husband and three children.

Rachna Singh

Rachna Singh is the Head of Unsecured Consumer Risk Models in Citi’s U.S. Personal Banking (USPB) division. Rachna leads a team focused on developing advanced quantitative tools that drive Underwriting, Account Management, and Collections strategies. In addition to the development of Citi’s proprietary models, she is also responsible for the evaluation of alternative data and third-party solutions for adoption in credit decisions. She is with Citi for 16 years and holds a major in Economics from Delhi School of Economics.

John Soroushian

John Soroushian is the Senior AI Advisor at FinRegLab and a fellow at NYU Stern Business School where he focuses on the intersection of technology, economics, and public policy. In his prior role at the Bipartisan Policy Center, he led an effort, in coordination with BPC’s director of strategic initiatives, to work with two members of Congress to put together a national strategy on AI for Congress. The effort resulted in a series of key stakeholders convenings and groundbreaking policy reports that became the basis for a national strategy on AI for Congress that passed as a House Resolution in 2020 and resulted in the formation of BPC’s technology project. At BPC, he led various initiatives focused on financial services, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. Prior to BPC, he worked at the US Treasury Department and Brookings Institution. Soroushian was shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for his writing on technology and economics. Soroushian graduated from UC San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in economics and holds an MBA from NYU Stern Business School.

Lawrence H Summers

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers is one of America’s leading economists. In addition to serving as 71st Secretary of  the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Summers served as Director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, as President of Harvard University, and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Dr. Summers’ tenure at the U.S. Treasury coincided with the longest period of sustained economic growth in U.S. history. He is the only Treasury Secretary in the last half century to have left office with the national budget in surplus. Dr. Summers has played a key role in addressing the major financial crisis for the last three decades.

During the 1990s, he was a leader in crafting the U.S. response to international financial crises arising in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Japan, and Asian emerging markets. As one of President Obama’s chief economic advisors, Dr. Summers’ thinking helped shape the U.S. response to the 2008 financial crisis, to the failure of the automobile industry, and to the pressures on the European monetary system. Upon Summers’ departure from the White House, President Obama said, “I will always be grateful that at a time of great peril for our country, a man of Larry’s brilliance, experience and judgment was willing to answer the call and lead our economic team.” The Economist recognized his influence when it defined the “Summers Doctrine,” an approach to economic policy during financial crises that fuses a microeconomic “laissez faire” mentality with macroeconomic activism. “Markets should allocate capital, labour and ideas without interference, but sometimes markets go haywire, and must be counteracted forcefully by government.”

Summers’ five years as President of Harvard represented a time of major innovation for the University. He focused on equality of opportunity and removing all financial obligation from students with family incomes below $60,000 a year. He launched a major effort to make Boston, and Cambridge in particular, the global leader in life sciences research, with the formation of major programs for stem cell research and genomics. Perhaps most importantly, he led efforts to renew Harvard College with dramatic increases in study abroad programs, faculty-student contact, and collaboration across the University during his tenure.

Currently, Dr. Summers is the President Emeritus and the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, where he became a full professor at age 28, one of the youngest in Harvard’s recent history. He directs the University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. Summers was the first social scientist to receive the National Science Foundation’s Alan Waterman Award for scientific achievement and, in 1993, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most outstanding economist under 40 in the United States. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. He has published more than 150 papers in scholarly journals.

Summers chairs the board of the Center for Global Development and serves as vice chair of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and as a board member or advisory board member to a number of other non-profits and public policy organizations. He is a contributor to Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. He is an advisor to businesses and investors and serves on the board of Doma, OpenAI and SkillSoft Corporation. He also consults with or advises a range of companies in the finance and technology sector, including D. E. Shaw & Co and Citi.

Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett is a columnist and member of the Editorial Board for the Financial Times. She writes a weekly column on Friday, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She also serves as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge.

Previously, she chaired the FT Editorial Board, ran Moral Money, the FT’s sustainability newsletter which she co-founded, and wrote two columns a week. She has been named Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009) and Business Journalist of the Year (2008) in the British Press Awards, and received three awards from America’s Society of Business and Economic Writers Awards. She is a best-selling and award-winning author of four books, and received the Royal Anthropological Institute Marsh Award and the American Anthropological Association President Medal for her work in social science. She has received honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Miami and Baruch, Exeter, Lancaster, and Goldsmith’s universities.

Dr. Clarence Wardell III 

Dr. Clarence Wardell III is a Senior Program Officer on the Economic Mobility and Opportunity team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he leads the team’s efforts to foster innovation to improve economic outcomes for individuals in the U.S. with low incomes. Before joining the foundation, Clarence served in several senior roles in the Biden-Harris Administration and on the transition team focused on policy implementation and advancing equity through the federal government, including as Senior Advisor for Policy Implementation and Delivery with the Domestic Policy Council and as the Chief Data and Equity Officer for the White House American Rescue Plan Team. Clarence has also previously served in roles at Results for America, CNA Corporation, and in the Obama Administration working to scale evidence-based solutions to address various challenges at the local, state, and federal levels of government. Clarence’s work in the Obama Administration, where he co-led the White House Police Data Initiative as a Presidential Innovation Fellow and member of the U.S. Digital Service, earned him recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2017. In 2012, Clarence co-founded and later sold tinyGive, a social media-based charitable giving platform.

Clarence holds a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.